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7 thoughts on “Discretion Is Not for Novelists”

I opine that to the extent that a novelist is passionate, bold, frank, s/he may cause strife with their family, and lose friends, since the offended parties will have recognized themselves in the less savoury characters inhabiting the novels.

Novelists wishing to write totally uninhibitedly must wish they could do so without friends or family knowing.

Phillip – If a novelist is doing his/her job correctly, family and friends should not be able to recognize themselves. That’s what fiction is about – taking the seed of something familiar and transforming it into something completely new. If a writer really wants to make family and friends mad, s/he should write a shoot-from-the-hip, tell-all autobiography. That’ll get people talking.

To change topic ever-so-slightly, you and I, in our comments, used “s/he” “his/her”, no doubt because societal values in regard to gender have changed faster than the English language. In addition, I used the plural “their” as the possessive pronoun for “s/he”.

Quite fortuitously, I was was in a discussion this very day about the use of “his/her”, with someone who writes for the Economist http://andreaskluth.org

He wrote” “…….“S/he” is American political correctness gone berserk, and “they” is worse: an escape into an inappropriate plural in order to be politically correct without admitting it…..””.

I agree with Mary. Although real events might inspire me to start daydreaming, there is no way I would write real people into a novel. First of all, real life in its raw form is rarely interesting enough to sustain an entire novel. Second of all, I read and write to experience things *beyond* my daily life. Third of all, I don’t have a lot of respect for people who try to stick it to someone in their fiction.

My husband has been studying gender and sexuality in college and his suggestion is that we just use “she” for everything. Let’s dump the male pronouns entirely. That ought to even out all of the uses of “he” as the default gender that have appeared throughout the years.

For as annoying as political correctness can get, there’s a reason for it. Language has power and if we truly want equality for the sexes, our language needs to reflect that. Frankly, I don’t mind using either he or she as a neutral catch-all for the singular gender. If one or the other is used throughout a piece, then you don’t have to fall back on “they” as “an inappropriate plural.” I do agree with Andreas about that – pronouns should agree, even if the writer has to go to gymnastic lengths to get them to do so.

You have enhanced my thoughts, Amy. The beauty of fiction is that a writer gets to make stuff up, which does lend itself to escape from the *real* world. I, too, don’t want to be sticking it to people in my fiction. Of course, we could work in the reverse. We could exalt our friends & family in our fiction.

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